Hello fellow Hivians!

So just yesterday Peakmonsters, one of the key Splinterlands market UI providers, announced the launch of their new token PKM.

First off, what amazing news this is. Peak is a hive staple and in my opinion was the best market UI for Splinterlands even before this announcement. There really only was 1 downside, they lost some marketshare to monstermarket due to their policy of revenue sharing with buyers.

Now if you have been using the in-game market solely this entire time I really feel for you because you've been missing out on a world of market tools at your fingertips. There are plenty but the most powerful in my opinion include the ability to put bids out for both card purchases AND, in my case more important, rentals. You can also see price history up to 1 month and utilize powerful card market sorting and filters. Finally, the block explorer that the site puts at your fingertips is simply the best out there for those that aren't entirely blockchain savvy. Simply put, you shouldn't ever use the in-game market again.

Token Overview

Use Cases

The Peakmonsters announcement and white paper cover the primary concept of the token including potential and confirmed use cases but here are the major ones:

Ongoing PKM airdrops based on market usage
An SPS:PKM pair via a Hive liquidity pool with added rewards
Peakmonsters market revenue sharing

Weakness say wha?

Now I started this off talking about how their one weakness was that monstermarket, their biggest competitor, offered revenue sharing. This token directly combats that weakness which means Peakmonsters should see a massive gain in market share and ultimately this will drive improvements on the monstermarket site as well (as it is desperately needed).

Distribution

This token is capped at 500M with an initial distribution of 25m to the team, 2.1M via initial airdrop, and around 2.5M via LP funding by the team.

With an estimated 3M/year aidrop distribution and a hard cap, this could potentially cause issues once it runs out but if you look through the white paper you'll notice that the airdrop and distribution planning at current rates would last potentially up to 100 years so this being a problem is not likely.

As you can see the vast majority of the token is setup to go out through the airdrops which is effectively what I would call peakmonsters 'profit sharing'. That said, 5% are going to come from LP rewards so lets talk about the LP for a minute.

Liquidity pools in general are an amazing thing to have and the reason is because they provide token stability. Without a way to move a token, there is little value in having it. I spoke with some of the PM team about the pool to learn a bit about their reasoning on choosing SPS as the sole PKM pair and quite frankly it just makes sense. SPS if you weren't aware, is the Splinterlands governance token. As such, an SPS:PKM token pairing creates a relationship with a token that is already widely correlated to PKM to begin with since they deal with the base game Splinterlands. Token correlation is important because it reduces the likelihood of impermanent loss which occurs when tokens in a pair move unequally, especially in opposite directions.

Given the liquidity pool is tied to SPS that also indirectly gives SPS yet another use case. That token just keeps getting better and better and with the release of PKM that will immediately tie up 210k SPS into this pool.

How to earn PKM

The short and sweet of it is simply to transact via the peakmonsters market. IE do your normal buy and sell activity there. Based on the amount of your activity, PKM will be effectively airdropped to you.

If you didn't know already, the site creates a profile for all of its users that tracks the $ value of activity on a rolling year period. You earn a profile 'tier' based on this activity amount which is then used to determine your airdrop eligibility.

As you can see above, I'm a tier 5 having transacted $910. Oof, I wonder how much DEC I would have earned back. That said, I have no regrets as I prefer to support the best products even if sometimes they aren't the cheapest. Not entirely relevant here but the adage, buy once - cry once, comes to mind. Plus it looks like my loyalty to peakmonsters is paying off in the form of this airdrop anyways so yay!

One major point to note is that rentals do not count towards this system. I'm hopeful that they do at some point but given the difference of how a rental is broadcasted on-chain vs a buy/sell I can understand this decision.

Closing Thoughts

So we have covered the explicitly defined use cases but the team has been very clear that they plan to implement additional features to Peakmonsters that will require PKM to utilize. Given the tools they have already created have been highly value time and time again, I imagine these future features will be an absolute necessity, especially if you play the role of 'card trader'. I could also see them implementing a card buyback system with a portion of the DEC they take as their market fee and allowing users to spend PKM to buy from it. This would directly tie PKM into DEC and SPS further and solidify its value on the market. Browsing through their feedback site has countless other functions that could end up being PKM gated so the future looks bright for Peakmonsters and PKM.

Disclaimers

Helpful Details

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